Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya
in the “Lands Below the Wind”^1
An Ideological Father of Radicalism
or a Popular Sufi Master?
Syamsuddin Arif
The recent upsurge of the so-called radicalism^2 in predominantly Mus-
lim-populated regions of Southeast Asia like Indonesia and Malaysia, has
been attributed to, among other things, the influence of Salafi thought
going back to the two prominent Ḥanbalīs Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328)
and his closest disciple Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 751/1350), as
interpreted and promulgated later by Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb
1 The Malay nomenclature negeri bawah angin is borrowed from Persian zīr-bād,
meaning literally “below the wind”, i. e., leeward, which has acquired a spe-
cific meaning among seafaring folk who used it to designate the countries east
of India. The islands “above the wind” were probably Ceylon, the Maldives,
Socotra, etc., whereas those situated “below the wind” were Malacca, Sumatra,
Tenasserim, Bengal, Martaban, and Pegu. See Yule, Sir Henry: Hobson-Jobson. A
Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms,
Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive, ed. by William Crooke,
London 1903, s. v. Zirbad, s. v. “zirbad”. See Clifford, Hugh and Swettenham,
Frank A.: A Dictionary of the Malay Language, Taiping 1894, vol. 1, p. 63, cited
in Azra, Azyumardi: Jaringan Ulama Nusantara, Bandung 1995, p. 183, n. 70.
2 Western observers and political analysts use both categories – “radical Islamism”
and “Islamic radicalism” – to refer to the ideology that allegedly calls for radi-
cal transformation of society and politics by whatever means into an absolute
theocracy. See Barton, Greg: Jemaah Islamiyah. Radical Islamism in Indonesia,
Sydney 2004, p. 28; and van Bruinessen, Martin: Genealogies of Islamic Radical-
ism in Post-Suharto Indonesia, in: South East Asia Research 10 (2002), pp. 117–
154, here pp. 117–118. See Center for Strategic and International Studies: Cur-
rents and Crosscurrents of Radical Islamism. A Report of the CSIS Transatlantic
Dialogue on Terrorism, April 2006, Washington 2006, p. 15; Desker, Barry and
Ramakrishna, Kumar: Forging an Indirect Strategy in Southeast Asia, in: The
Washington Quarterly 25 (2002), pp. 161–176, esp. p. 163. The author would like
to thank the Research Management Center of IIUM.
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